Is it true that the Vikings drank from the skulls of their enemies?

According to a widely circulated legend, brave Scandinavian sailors made vessels for wine from the bones of defeated opponents. We checked if this is true.

This information can be found from such popular sources as IA Regnum, "Faktrum", "Army and Navy". About such an act on the part of Jarl Mezang writes Valentin Ivanov in his historical trilogy “Primordial Rus'”. The topic found a response in the famous TV series "Vikings" and many other works of art.

As further proof of the former popularity of the barbaric custom, it is often lead the exclamation skål, which modern Danes, Swedes and Norwegians use to accompany the clinking of glasses. The etymology of the word goes back to scalle (“skull”; compare with the English skull), and the association of the exclamation with the Normans became the basis for anthem American football club Minnesota Vikings.

Indeed, evidence of such practices can be found even in "Songs about Volunda" - a work included in the Elder Edda, the main collection of Old Norse myths and tales. The title character, a Finnish king imprisoned on an island, lies in wait for the sons of his offender, kills them, makes bowls from their skulls and sends them to their father. In another Eddic song "Greenland speeches of Atli" Gudrun, Sigurd's widow, kills her sons born from King Atli and feeds him their meat, and serves beer mixed with blood in cups she made from their skulls.

Moreover, judging by the excavations, such vessels were not something rare in real life. They were made in different cultures over different periods of time. The three oldest skull bowls were found in Gough's Cave in Somerset, England, and are 14,700 years old. Other skulls processed after the death of their owners and possibly used as cups have been discovered at Navinpuquio in Peru (400–700) and in the El Mirador cave in Spain (Bronze Age).

During the Neolithic era, mass production of skull bowls was established in Herxheim (Germany). In historical records one can find references to the use of skulls as drinking vessels among the Aghori sect in India and the Aborigines in Australia, Fiji and other islands of Oceania. Tibetan skull bowls known as dripping, were used by Buddhists and Zoroastrians.

There is evidence of individual cases of making such cups and in Japan And Central Asia. Herodotus reported similar practices among Scythians. It did not bypass medieval Europe either. George Acropolis writesthat the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan around 1205 made a goblet from the skull of the Emperor of the Latin Empire Baldwin I of Flanders. The most famous episode in Russia is described in "Tales of Bygone Years", where the Pecheneg Khan Kurya kills the Prince of Kyiv Svyatoslav Igorevich, and then drinks from a cup, the base of which is the bound skull of a descendant of the Varangians. However, this artifact cannot be found in any museum in the world today, so it is difficult to say that it ever existed.

However, even if everything was so, Svyatoslav, who had a distant relationship with the Vikings, in this case became a victim, not an initiator. But what about real cases from the history of the Vikings? Alas, this is much more complicated. How note Leading Researcher at the Laboratory of Medieval Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Head of the Varangian Club Fyodor Uspensky and researcher of Slavic-Germanic linguistic interaction Anna Litvina, “the story of making a cup from the enemy’s head is found exclusively in epic songs and in their rather late prose retellings, where we are talking about the same circle of epic characters. In other words, it was not reflected in any way either in skaldic poetry or in the so-called historical-realistic sagas, from which we can conclude that this practice in the Germanic world lies more in the space of the sacred, legendary-mythological and, so to speak, poetic-linguistic, rather than in the field of actual medieval military customs - so, for the Scandinavians, this quasi-ritual is obviously "prehistoric" The authors of the work trace all such plots to ancient works, where such actions were fully consistent with the barbaric character of the heroes. The Vikings, despite all their ferocity, were not real barbarians.

So, there is no such information in historical written documents. The question could be resolved by archaeologists, however, judging by numerous sources, they do not find bowls made from skulls in the Scandinavian lands, or rather, in the corresponding cultural layers. And this is strange, because if such objects were distributed everywhere (as the films tell us), then at least one would be found. At the same time, judging by excavations, in this aspect, the life of the Vikings was varied: there were horns, wooden bowls decorated with patterns, and glass cones. But there's a problem with skulls. A little further south, in Prussia, found skulls with the tops cut off, but they are dated to the Neolithic or early Iron Age, and the scope of use of the cut-off part has not been reliably established.

Where did this stereotype about Vikings with bowls from the remains of their enemies come from? Partially probably from the Elder Edda, but a number of modern researchers refer to another, much later source of error. In 1651, the Danish naturalist, physician and collector Ole Worm published his work “Runes: The Ancient Literature of Denmark,” which included a number of translations of ancient runic texts into Latin. The 12th century skaldic poem “Krakumal” (“The Lay of Krak”) was also included there. In one of the episodes of the poem said: "drekkum bjór af bragði ór bjúgviðum hausa", which literally means: "We will soon drink beer from the curved branches of skulls." And in Worm’s interpretation it turned into “sperabant heroes se in aula Othini bibituros ex craniis eorum qvos occiderant” (“The heroes hoped to drink in Odin’s palace from the skulls of those they killed”). Although Ole Worm was a Scandinavian, he apparently did not fully master the art of perception. kennings — figurative phrases that ancient Germanic storytellers used to denote more mundane things. For example, a “ship” could appear in their poems as a “horse of the sea,” and “curved branches of skulls” here should be understood as... ordinary animal horns. A more correct option given in another publication: “Soon we will drink honey from the bent trees of the beast’s forehead.” Here, as you can see, the meaning is more than transparent. This is how, due to a translation error, the legend about the Vikings with bowls from the skulls of their enemies received additional confirmation.

What about the exclamation skål (for Icelanders and Faroese - skál)? Natalie Kelly and Jost Zetsche in their book “Subtleties of Translation. How language influences our lives and transforms the world" notethat these words are linguistically unrelated to the word skull (“skull” - English) and simply mean “cup” or “drinking vessel”. The Etymologeek resource also agrees with them, erecting words to the Proto-Germanic root skēlō (“shell”; hence the English shell).

Thus, there is no serious reason to assert that the Vikings, at least more often than in isolated unverified cases, drank from the skulls of their enemies.

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Anna Litvina, Fyodor Uspensky. Praise of generosity, skull cup, golden lud...
2. Mark Forsyth. A Brief History of Drinking
3. Natalie Kelly, Jost Zetsche. Subtleties of translation. How language influences our lives and transforms the world.
4. Did Vikings drink from the skulls of their enemies?